JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Software piracy has been an ongoing issue for decades and it has a tremendous economic impact on software business. Software piracy seems to be especially common among young people, who often are technologically oriented and happen to be students. The purpose of this study was to map out what kind of a role software piracy plays among the students of the University of Oulu. The goal was also to find out how common software piracy is and how the software piracy rates differ among different subpopulations as well as finding out the reasons for software piracy. The study was of quantitative nature and a survey was conducted in order to gather data. In addition, a conceptual model was proposed and its purpose was to map out which factors influence the attitudes and intentions regarding pirating software, and the questions of the survey were partly based on the conceptual model. The aforementioned survey was distributed to the students of the University of Oulu as an online link via email. This study examined and compared the demographic factors as well as the reasons and purposes behind software piracy. The results of this study indicate that age and gender have statistical significance with software piracy. When it came to reasons, expensiveness was the most significant reason, which was in line with previous literature. The study also investigated the views of university students regarding software piracy. The connections in the conceptual model were explored as well: the factors presented in the conceptual model were found to be correlated although the strength of the correlation varied greatly. In addition, all of the connections in the model had statistical significance.